by Brad Heath, USA TODAY

by Brad Heath, USA TODAY

U.S. immigration officials reversed course late Friday and said they allow a fugitive charged with a brazen $2.8 million gold heist to come back to the United States to stand trial.

Raonel Valdez was arrested two months ago in Belize after an international manhunt that spanned four countries over nearly a year; he has been locked up there awaiting extradition. But in the months after his arrest, immigration officials had repeatedly told investigators that they would not permit him to re-enter the United States, effectively blocking his return.

That approval is a necessary â?? and almost always routine â?? part of bringing fugitives back to the United States from overseas.

A spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Barbara Gonzalez, said Friday evening that the agency had approved Valdez's return. She did not say why the agency had changed its mind.

The shift came shortly after USA TODAY and other media outlets reported that Valdez's return had been blocked, raising the threat that Belize would have little choice but to free him.

Valdez is facing charges that he and two other men spent months stalking a gold courier in Miami. Police said the three men finally cornered the courier inside the elevator of his Coral Gables, Fla. apartment building in October 2012. The courier told the police that one of the men aimed a gun at him while the other two grabbed two rolling suitcases packed with 110 pounds of gold flakes, valued at about $2.8 million.

Police arrested Valdez two weeks later. A GPS bracelet he was wearing because of an unrelated arrest tied him to the robbery and let investigators reconstruct how he had tailed the courier before the crime. The courier, George Villegas, identified him as one of the robbers.

Valdez fled the United States not long after a judge freed him on $75,000 bond.

Police and Marshals Service investigators tracked him from Florida to the Bahamas and Mexico. He was finally arrested in Belize when he tried to cross the border into Guatemala using a Cuban passport.